Trump, Inspired by Nixon?

Donald Trump’s campaign manager has suggested that Richard Nixon’s speech at the 1968 Republican National Convention influenced the one Trump will deliver this week.

PHOTOGRAPH VIA GETTY

The world waits, though perhaps not eagerly, to hear what Donald J. Trump will say on Thursday night, when he accepts the Republican Party’s Presidential nomination. His campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, may have lessened the anticipatory moment by telling reporters at a Bloomberg News breakfast on Monday to take a look at Richard Nixon’s 1968 acceptance speech, suggesting that Trump found inspiration there. “We started on the speech a couple of weeks ago,” Manafort said. “We looked at previous Conventions' speeches; the one he focussed on, though, was Nixon in 1968.” To a Times reporter, Trump said, “I think what Nixon understood is that when the world is falling apart, people want a strong leader whose highest priority is protecting America first. The sixties were bad, really bad. And it’s really bad now. Americans feel like it’s chaos again.” That speech, Manafort said, "is pretty much on line with a lot of the issues that are going on today,” by which he meant—well, what, exactly?

The 1968 Republican National Convention, in Miami, was held in early August, following the murders of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in April, and Robert F. Kennedy, in June, and major riots in Washington and Baltimore. It preceded the Democratic Convention, in Chicago, during which the nation could watch thousands of police battling protesters on South Michigan Avenue, in Grant Park, and elsewhere, with billy clubs and tear gas.

In his acceptance speech, Nixon talked about law and order, still a favorite Republican trope, and about getting a new, tougher Attorney General, but Manafort may find more promising material in Nixon's 1968

If Trump, calling upon the talents of a team that seems to have prepared Melania Trump’s national début by borrowing from Michelle Obama’s 2008 Convention speech, really does hark back to Nixon, someone might remind him that Nixon’s speech came from other, somewhat more authentic streams. Before speaking in Miami, Nixon had retreated to Montauk, on Long Island, a favorite spot, where he was accompanied by two speechwriters, Raymond K. Price, the moderate former editorial-page editor of the New York Herald Tribune, and the conservative former editorialist Pat Buchanan, though Nixon, who had solitary habits, spent most of his time alone, setting down his thoughts in longhand.

The best rhetorical idea, though, came from William Gavin, a political novice who, before being recruited by Nixon’s law partner Leonard Garment, taught high-school English in Pennsylvania—“from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf,” as he put it, when I interviewed him for a book about Nixon and Dwight D. Eisenhower. It was Gavin who came up with the section of the speech that began, “Tonight I see the face of a child.” Nixon liked that, and the “I see a” cadence; by its final version, the idea had mutated into “That child . . . is America. . . . He is everything we ever hoped to be and everything we dare to dream to be." From there the speech went to a memory of Nixon himself as a child in East Whittier, California, who “hears the trains go by at night and . . . dreams of faraway places where he'd like to go,” whose father “had to go to work before he finished the sixth grade,” whose “gentle, Quaker mother” wept when he enlisted in the Navy, and whose “courageous wife and loyal children stood by him in victory and also defeat”—someone who was now a nominee for President. Gavin told me, “I think he knew in his gut he had to show another side of himself that hitherto he had not shown,” while knowing that he had to avoid the trap of the famous, and maudlin, 1952 “Checkers” speech, which helped Nixon survive accusations of having an eighteen-thousand-dollar slush fund. “My stuff was offbeat enough for him to see that the problems he faced in that speech demanded that he present those parts of himself that are going to appear to a wider audience than just Republican,” Gavin said. “Taking a chance on ‘I see the face of a child’ was a very big chance for him, because of the Checkers speech.”

The very idea of Trump channelling the 1968 Nixon—the trains in the night, the voices of children—is odd to the point of being alarming, not least because it’s hard to imagine two people less alike than the seventy-year-old Trump, a reality-show star and real-estate developer, and Nixon, who, a deeply flawed man in full, had, by 1968, at age fifty-five, already served as a congressman, senator, and two-term Vice-President. As for what Nixon might have thought about Trump’s insular world, one only has to hear the undisguised loathing in his voice when, years after he left the White House, he talked about people “playing golf every afternoon” in “watering places like the south coast of France and Newport and Palm Springs and Palm Beach.” Watering places!

Nixon, like Trump, cared about money and success, but he was also insatiable in his curiosity about history, politics, and the world. When he spoke in Miami in 1968, he was already thinking about restoring diplomatic relations with the country then known as Red China. And, for all the help on the acceptance speech that Nixon got from Price, Buchanan, and Gavin, its central author was Richard Nixon. “My idea was ‘look into the faces of our children. This is what’s important,’ ” Gavin recalled. “It wasn’t about his boyhood”—about growing up in Southern California. “The next day he saw me, and he says, ‘Did you see what I did with that? Did you see it coming?’ ”

Jeffrey Frank, a senior editor at The New Yorker from 1995 to 2009, is a regular contributor to newyorker.com.